White House plays ‘who’s on first’ routine with missing emails

January 18, 2008

The vaunted White House communications team, starting way back with Ari Fleischer, came up with a simple strategy when it comes to misleading the country: if you speak with authority, and sound convinced, your lies will have the air of the legitimacy.

Take the missing White House emails flap, for example. This week, the Bush gang’s lawyers acknowledged in a court filing that it re-used backup computer tapes of email before October 2003, meaning that millions of key emails from a critical time period are likely gone forever.

Yesterday, reporters asked White House spokesperson Tony Fratto where the missing emails went. It quickly devolved into a Laurel-and-Hardy Abbott-and-Costello-like routine, with Fratto lying blatantly, though speaking with absolute certainty. (ThinkProgress has the humorous clip.)

Q: [A]re there in fact the emails missing? What’s the likelihood of their recovery versus the —

Fratto: …I think to the best of what all the analysis we’ve been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there’s no evidence of that. There’s no — we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our backup systems, we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.

Q: Where are they?

Fratto: Where are what?

Q: Where are part of —

Fratto: Which email? […]

Q: [I]f you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

Fratto: Yes, which documents?

For crying out loud, can’t anybody here play this game?

Let’s unpack this a little. Fratto said, authoritatively, that White House officials have “absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing.” This comes, of course, after Dana Perino told reporters from the same podium, “I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost…. We screwed up, and we’re trying to fix it.”

Confronted with reality as described by his own boss, Fratto said, “I’m not sure what was said on that. I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing.”

Look, Tony Fratto was clearly lying yesterday. That’s not even open to any real debate; everything he said on the subject was the opposite of the truth. Bush allies might argue, “Fratto doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that’s not entirely his fault.” But that doesn’t work at all — he was authorized to speak on behalf of the president of the United States on a pressing subject involving the White House possibly violating the law.

If Fratto didn’t know the truth, he has the option of telling the press corps, “I don’t know; let me find out.” He, regrettably, chose a different path. If Fratto had any credibility left before yesterday, he might be in trouble today. Lucky for him, that isn’t really a problem.

As for the bigger picture, Fratto’s obvious falsehoods were not well received on the Hill.

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is “no evidence” that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto’s assertion “seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,” Waxman said.

That’s a very polite way of saying, “The White House is lying, so I felt compelled to set the record straight.”

“…we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.”

“We” includes himself, Tony Fratto. Therefore, if he, Tony Fratto, is personally ignorant of a 2005 report that says emails are missing, then “we” become ignorant by extension.

I don’t give a darn!

  • I’m sure this latest crime will not be serious enough to soil Nancy’s clean tablecloth.

    I want some leadership. If the Republicans had 1/10th of this much actual malfeasance, they would have impeached Clinton and succeeded. But here we are, with Nancy and Harry playing interference for the criminals by saying they shouldn’t be impeached for lying us into a disastrous war, destroying the career of a CIA agent because her husband called bullshit on their war lies, destroying some of the evidence of all that and then lying about the coverup.

    &^%#*@ our “leadership” is worthless.

  • Who’s on first was Abbott and Costello, not Laurel and Hardy. It really sounds like Dumb and Dumber

  • #3 should read “If the Republicans had evidence of 1/10th of this much actual malfeasance”

    proofreading is hard when you’re %$#@& pissed.

  • I seriously doubt that the Republicans were actually able to destroy all the evidence, those emails went out to dozens of PCs which unless they’ve been wiped hard will still contain the emails. I’d like to see Waxman demand that proper forensics be done, and if the Bushies object to that then cut off their funding.

  • I would say this is more like “hide the salami,” to quote our DNC leader, than ‘who’s on first.”

  • And we are surprised that the White House is lying??????

    Common guys and gals. Get a grip. They lie. They do it often and obviously get away with it.

  • Who’s on first was Abbott and Costello, not Laurel and Hardy.

    Darn it, I always get those two confused. It’s fixed.

  • It is time for impeachment hearings. Requests from an impeachment investigation are the only ones the White House won’t be able to ignore or refuse. Surely the destruction of the emails, which are required to be kept by law, constitutes a high crime or misdemeanor.

    By January 9, 2009 all that will be left in the executive branch will be empty file cabinets and computers without hard drives. Of course, the loyal Bushies will claim, “The computers never had hard drives. The Clinton people took them all when they left!”

    But we should demand that the presidential candidates pledge to continue investigations into Bush administration crimes anyway, once we have an honest Justice Dept. again, even if there probably won’t be any evidence left.

    As an aside, it will be interesting to see how they eventually word the presidential pardons. If they list the individual crimes, the pardons will be the size of the federal budget. I suspect that Bush will borrow from Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” (after he has someone read it for him) and just give every political appointee a letter saying “By my hand and for the good of the country, the bearer had done what has been done.”

  • The problem for those of us who don’t have Build Your Own Reality kits is we find it hard to believe people would joke about certain things.

    That’s why Fratto’s bit about the e-mails strikes us as disturbing. “Is he crazy? How can he stand there and lie?”

    Easy. He doesn’t care. It’s all a big joke to the clowns in the White House. They can say anything they want and no one can do a thing about it. “Haw, haw, did you see their faces?” It’s the verbal equivalent of big brother grabbing little brother’s arm and making him smack his own head. “Stop hitting yourself, why are you hitting yourself?”

  • This is a pretty clear violation of the Hatch Act. For now, ignore the Frattos, Cards, Roves and Cheneys — open an investigation and prosecute the IT staff of the White House and OVP. If you are a gatekeeper for the Executive Branch (IT or administrative staff), you have to be aware of these issues. They didn’t do their jobs, plain and simple.

    Sweat the little guys until there’s a link to a big guy.

    (And, in the meantime, get a forensic data expert on the case. I seriously doubt they covered their tracks completely.)

  • For anybody who isn’t paying attention to the sports world, Olympic and world-class runner Marion Jones was stripped of her medals and titles due to her use of performance enhancing drugs durig competition and training. She’s also going to jail. She going to jail not because she took these drugs, she’s going to jail because she LIED. These f*cks in the White House lie every day, all the time, with literally every sentence the communicate. And not a damn one of them is behind bars. They should be. And I’d like to see Congressional Democrats taking charge to make it so. Republican rot has infested the executive branch agencies that should be doing this job, so it’s up to Congress to see justice is served.

  • Quiz:

    Q: What happens when the White House breaks the law?
    A: They lie about it…

    Q: What happens when the White House gets caught lying about breaking the law?
    A: They lie some more…

    Q: What happens when the White House gets caught lying about lying about breaking the law?
    A: They blame in on the Clinton admin.

    Q: What will the dumbocrats in control of Congress do about it?
    A: Not a damn thing…

  • Look, I would like nothing better than to impeach this worthless horse’s arse, but the reality is that it is too late. Oh sure, technically it is never too late, but let’s be pragmatic for a moment. In less than a year we will have a new president elect. A short time later that person will be sworn into office.

    Besides, when the Republican led Congress initiated impeachment proceedings against Clinton they had a stronger majority than the Democrats have right now.

    Democrats in the Congress should be focusing their energies on helping more Democrats get elected. That is a far more useful way to spend their energy at this point.

  • “…we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.”
    It’s just that no one can find them. So, somewhere in cyberspace, on a server, they probably exist, so they aren’t technically “missing”, they are SOMEWHERE, we just can’t pinpoint the precise location.
    So, if I steal money from my employer, and he calls me on it, I can just say that the money isn’t missing, it’s there…somewhere, you just can’t find.

    Is this the logic here?

  • #12 Bee Thousand – If I’m not mistaken it’s the Records Retention Act. The Hatch Act has to do with doing partisan business on government property.

  • Anyone have any idea just exactly what the difference is in the size, in employment numbers, of Congress and all its staffers versus the White House (including Veep Necromancer) and all its staffers? Also, does anyone know what storage system and retention policy Congress uses, versus the White House?

  • Independent Thinker…

    It is never too late to impeach these criminals. Even if not completed before the end of the Bush term, starting the process would let our allies around the world know that someone in the U.S. cares about the Bush criminality.

    Impeach Bush. Impeach Cheney.
    Then turn them over to an International Tribunal for trial on their Crimes Against Humanity!

  • I’m more reminded of Joe Isuzu, Tommy Flanagan, or Nathan Thurm as far as a comedy routine.
    I’d love for a WH reporter to ask if Fratto was going to change his name to Tommy Flanagan.

  • Good comment, RacerX (#3 et seq.)

    Pelosi can’t start impeachment proceedings — no matter how beneficial the hearings themselves would be, whether they led to impeachment or not — because she is also guilty, having let the White House snooker her into being, in effect, a co-conspirator.

    To borrow a phrase from one of my favorite relatives, she’s as worthless as tits on a boar.

  • Now, hear me out on this before you all decide to drag me to the nearest tree and hang me…okay?

    Fratto isn’t lying.

    The emails are not missing, and the WH knows exactly where they are. They’re still stored on hard-drives, and backup tapes—and those storage systems are, in all likelihood, sitting somewhere off the Atlantic coast, in several hundred feet of saltwater.

    If the backup tapes had merely been “recorded over,” then a good data forensics team could reconstruct a sizable portion of the data—and they could probably recover better than 80% of ANYTHING from a hard drive. Simply erasing doesn’t guarantee elimination. Throwing everything into a garbage truck won’t work; evidence might wind up in a landfill that needs “cleaning up” some day—and who wants an incriminating disc or two popping up ten years down the road?

    Plus—given all the “tech-updates” that the BU$h administration has incorporated as part of their “secrecy” programs, am I supposed to believe that these guys still do all their backups on flimsy, static-sensitive tapes? In the day and age of CD-R and CD-RW—they still use tapes?

    Please…..

  • SmilingDixie, dont’ get me wrong…I would LOVE to see the bastards put before an internatioal tribunal, but that is not going to happen.

    But right now I’d rather see members of Congress working to put a Democrat in the White House and more Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives. An impeachment hearing would consume a huge amount of time and resources.

    I am as angry as the next person about what Bushand his cronies have done. Heck, I have even used my skills as an artist to paint how I feel about Iraq onto a few canvases.

    Right now I want to focus my energies on electing a Democrat for President and restoring some integrety to the institution. We should all be focusing on that and getting as close to 60 Dems in the Senate as possible.

    Remember, the next President will likely select THREE Supreme Court justices.

  • Bottom line is that we don’t have the e-mails. Libby is still free. Gonzales is free. Meirs is still in contempt. Cheney is still in office. Millions are missing in Iraq. On and on and on. Wings flap but nothing takes off.

  • Turns out it’s the Presidential Records Act that’s being violated. Link

    c) During his term of office, the President may dispose of those of his Presidential records that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value if–
    (1) the President obtains the views, in writing, of the Archivist concerning the proposed disposal of such Presidential records; and
    (2) the Archivist states that he does not intend to take any action under subsection (e) of this section.

    And:

    § 2207. Vice-Presidential records

    Vice-Presidential records shall be subject to the provisions of this chapter in the same manner as Presidential records. The duties and responsibilities of the Vice President, with respect to Vice-Presidential records, shall be the same as the duties and responsibilities of the President under this chapter with respect to Presidential records.

    ……………………………………………

    @ 23: Plus—given all the “tech-updates” that the BU$h administration has incorporated as part of their “secrecy” programs, am I supposed to believe that these guys still do all their backups on flimsy, static-sensitive tapes? In the day and age of CD-R and CD-RW—they still use tapes?

    They probably have (and should have) a multiple-redundant system, but it’s possible they were archiving to DAT tape, possibly in conjunction with another method (RAID storage, for example). It’d be interesting to know, regardless.

  • ***independent thinker***you should change your name…it’s misleading. No republican will win the WH this time. Your’s is a defeatist attitude. Congress is perfectly capable of “doing their jobs” and impeaching this administration and it wouldn’t take up too much time and expense or distract from “policy making”. In fact it would do more to break up this republican obstructionism in the senate than anything else. It is necessary to protect our democracy more than to get revenge on Bush/Cheney. Sounds like you have made up your mind without even looking at what is accomplished by impeachment. Read Howard Fein, a conservative, on why impeachment is necessary and how it will affect the future of our country if we don’t impeach. But you needn’t worry. Pelosi and Reid can’t jump fast enough to give Bush everything he calls for.

    Reid is already pushing for telecom amnesty, given only to big powerful corporations who have enough $ to bribe the congress which they have been openly doing over the past year. There’s your compromise…Reid and Cheney joined forces to protect corporations that Bush bribed with lucrative contracts to break the law. Reid rushes to join Bush against Dodd’s filibuster. Patriotism has nothing to do with the telecom’s behavior as they shut down the wire tapping of terrorists in place by the FBI for failure to pay their phone bills.

    We can’t get these cowardly dems to act and are already looking for the next election to save us while our freedoms are removed, and our economy tanks from being ripped off by corporate greed, we continue to torture, and more people needlessly die because people like you think it would be too much time and trouble to impeach these bastards. You just don’t have enough to lose to make impeachment urgent and so continue to live in fear of your president…of what he might do next, praying nothing happens before the next election.

  • Those tapes are in all liklihood in Cheney’s safes. They will be buried in secret chambers within the GWB Presidential library so that they will never see the light of day. That way the re-writing of history can proceed unimpeded.

  • When the Clinton admin left the Whitehouse, the computers were all missing the “W” key on keyboards. When the new administration moves in, there won’t be any computers or equipment at all. Or there will be all new shiny stuff waiting compliments of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth.

  • The logic is simple.

    They have no evidence of anything missing.

    There are 473 days of no e-mails.

    Therefore for 473 days no one sent an email to anyone.

    Seems plausible, don’t you think?

  • They are probably using this time to reconstruct bogus emails/conversations that will hold up against casual scrutiny, you know just enough time to get the hell out of dodge and back Saudi Arabia and Haliburton HQ where they can live happily ever after on billions of tax payer dollars lifted during the heinous reign of the is administration

  • I did not have sex with that women…..why won’t Hilary disclose her emails, papers, etc. from when she was in the White House? Don’t we deserve to see this information to help us make an informed decision about our next president?

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